'Titanfall' Release Date Coming: EA Says Franchise Is Here To Stay

Are you excited about the planned March 11 launch of the first-person shooter video game “Titanfall?” You should be. That's because the franchise isn’t going anywhere, Electronic Arts Inc., the title's publisher, says.

During the Stifel Technology, Internet & Media Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen said he sees “Titanfall” as having long-term potential. “As you can imagine, this will be a franchise that’s around for a long, long time. I think people will be very excited,” he said.

Jorgensen said that “Titanfall,” “Battlefield” and the recently acquired “Star Wars: Battlefront” are “core franchises.” Though the titles are all first-person shooters, he felt they were all different from one another. “Battlefield” is a more realistic, military-themed title, “Titanfall” has a futuristic setting and “Star Wars: Battlefront” will focus heavily on the movie franchise of the same name.

“All three of those are different, all three of those can coexist in any one year, and we feel like they’re pillars for us going forward in an area where the consumer really wants to have that kind of excitement in a video game,” Jorgensen stated.

The CFO also talked about how "Titanfall" developer Respawn Entertainment and EA plan to avoid any conflicts with the release of “Titanfall,” especially after the problematic launch of “Battlefield 4” in October.

Since “Battlefield 4’s” launch last year, the game has experienced major technical issues and crashes across all platforms. When players complained, EA and its DICE subsidiary responded swiftly, creating patches for the game. A patch for PS4 errors was launched on Jan. 14, when DICE promised development on future games would be placed on hold until “BF4” was working correctly.

"We know we still have a ways to go with fixing the game -- it is absolutely our number one priority. The team at DICE is working nonstop to update the game,” an EA representative told gaming website IGN in December.

Jorgensen said the game’s faulty launch was partially due to DICE not being well-adjusted to the next-gen PS4 and Xbox One. “I think the one thing to remember on ‘Battlefield,’ ‘Battlefield’ is an extremely complicated, very big, large, expansive game -- 64 players, 60 frames per second, built on a new console that was essentially just coming out,” Jorgensen told the audience. “You tend to have very challenging development on games like that, and we’ve been very focused on making sure that any issues that we’ve had have been patched or repaired, or provided updates.”

“Titanfall” may avoid similar issues because it’s only launching on Microsoft’s Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC.

“I’d say ‘Titanfall’ has had more time on that platform,” Jorgensen continued. “The team’s very experienced -- they’re very experience on building a game and it’s only a single platform game, so it makes it less complicated. Doesn’t have as much multiplayer, it’s 12 multiplayer. It is 60 frames per second, so it is a beautiful game, but I believe that the team has done a great job, and we’re always trying to take lessons learned from previous issues and build them into the new game. You never know exactly what will happen when you start to run through all the gyrations that our consumers always run through, but we’re always there to make sure that it’s getting updated and robust over time and make sure that the consumer experience is fantastic.”

Do you think "Titanfall" has lasting power as a franchise? Leave a comment below or tweet me!